One of the great technological problems that today's society has, in addition to the autonomy of batteries, is to discover some new technology that allows us store a larger amount of data in a much smaller space without losing, or even increasing, data transfer speeds.
Based on the latest work presented by Fabian natterer, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, apparently this would be much closer than we think thanks to the possibility of store data at the atomic level. At the moment we can only store 2 bits in an atom but this density could be increased by up to 1.000 times which would allow us, for example, to be able to store the current iTunes catalog on a device as large as a credit card.
The first steps are taken to develop atomic hard drives.
Going into a little more detail, apparently and as I have been able to understand, in the first prototypes of this storage device it is being tindalized Holmium, a chemical element that is very suitable for this type of task since it has many electrons capable of creating a strong magnetic field while they are placed in an orbit very close to the center where they are protected from the outside.
According to the group in charge of the development of this work, today more than 100.000 atoms are used to store a single bit, so reducing this type of needs could lead us to achieve smaller storage spaces. Keep in mind that we are talking, for the moment, about a technology that it still takes a long time to develop a commercial product.
Further information: Nature